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Category: Inspiration

This category is supposed to help you break your creativity block by exploring galleries of art, design and photography. It also features showcases of web designs (blogs, portfolios and online-shops) and design elements (navigation menus, search boxes). Different from Showcases, here you will more general and abstract ideas. The section covers galleries of beautiful photography, articles about influential artists and their styles as well as showcases of art and digital art.

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One of the advantages of working in a creative industry is the number of designers and developers who take their craft seriously. The design community shines in one regard in particular: the design community seems to be less willing to hoard knowledge and skills. Instead, we present them, elaborate on them and keep improving on each other's techniques — among other media — magazines and books.

In this overview of magazines you'll find everything from purely online publications to monthly, glossy print editions, where all subjects relevant to art and design are being investigated in colorful, eloquent detail.

We can all agree that the work we do should inform, be appropriate to the client and their audience, and, of course, look good. But there’s a bonus third attribute worth aiming for—creating a lasting impression.

Visual memory is fascinating; we use it often without realizing. If for example you ask someone how many rooms they have in their home, before answering, most will in their minds eye (possibly even with their eyes closed to aid concentration) walk through each room, adding up as they go. If graphic designers can tap into the benefits of this phenomenon, providing visual triggers to keep the subject matter of their work fresh in audiences’ memories, this has to be advantageous.

“So, you do nothing all day.” That’s how many people would respond to someone who says they spend the day with a pen or pencil in their hand. It’s often considered an empty practice, a waste of time. They’re seen as an empty mind puttering along with the busy work of scribbling.

But for us designers and artists, drawing pictures all day is integral to our process and to who we are as creative people, and despite the idea that those who doodle waste time, we still get our work done. So, then, why are those of us who draw pictures all day even tempted to think that someone who is doodling or drawing pictures in a meeting or lecture is not paying attention?

The Web font revolution that started around two years ago has brought up a topic that many of us had merrily ignored for many years: font rendering. The newfound freedom Web fonts are giving us brings along new challenges.

Choosing and using a font is not merely a stylistic issue, and it's worth having a look at how the technology comes into play. While we cannot change which browser and OS our website visitors use, understanding why fonts look the way they do helps us make websites that are successful and comfortable to read in every scenario

It has been said that "we read best what we read most". This quote was used as a type specimen in Emigre magazine in the late 1980's by Zuzana Licko. It was written in defense of her typefaces, whose elemental shapes—designed with the strictures of the early HP laser printer in mind—challenged the commonly held notions of what made typefaces legible.

The paradigm shift—wrought by the personal computer, Postscript and desktop publishing—should have had a massive impact on the shapes of our typographic characters, just as the advances of the World Wide Web further changed the way we viewed words (even though letterforms change at the pace of the most conservative reader). Thus, radical innovations like Kurt Schwitters' Systemschrift, (a phoenetic alphabet from 1927), are doomed to fail.

In 2011 we saw the rise in popularity of two relatively new trends: responsive Web design and the use of HTML’s canvas. While some websites had experimented with both, in the last 12 months we’ve seen these trends move from the fringes firmly into the mainstream.

Responsive Web design is more a concept than a technology — an ideal that many new websites aspire to. Canvas, on the other hand, is an HTML5-based technology that opens the door to a new wave of interactivity.

As a Japanese person living in Europe, I’m sometimes asked: “Japanese is a difficult language, isn’t it?”. Those asking are often surprised when my answer is a simple: “No, actually, it’s not.”.

While it is true (at least to many Westerners) that Japanese is an exotic language, when compared to learning other European languages, it may seem harder because it has has no relation to their own language. But from my own experiences of learning English and German (and also from seeing some European friends learning Japanese), I can say with confidence that learning spoken Japanese is, in fact, not so difficult. [Content Care Nov/30/2016]

Before the very first page of a book has been read, you've already analyzed it in countless ways without even noticing. The paper stock, the thickness of the binding, the aroma, the color of the type and even the texture of the cover; the very character of the book is being dissected by the hand and eye at every moment.

In this brief second there is a dialogue between the reader and the object. This conversation is subtle and complex, but for most people it is entirely subconscious. This is because we rarely think about these things — we feel them instead.

Do you know what makes a design good? Is it merely an opinion, or is there something more to it? Breaking design down seems like such an abstract thing. Even the designers who are able to create thought-provoking work seem purely talented and have natural abilities that can’t really be nailed down to a process. But what if there were principles that captured why design and art worked the way that they do?

Google+, Hipster, Connect.me and Instagram! They all hit a gazillion users in no time at all — and you can even read all about it in everyday media today. This is every product creator’s dream. Ok, granted, Google already had their users well before the launch of its social extension. But how did the other ones succeed in building such a strong fellowship in a few months (or even days)?

Turns out that many of these services’ creators were very busy bees and made small details about their product’s launch addictive. It even turns out that many start-ups were indeed able to launch to a strong following (not much unlike Google+) through collecting interested users, email addresses, Twitter followers in any way they could well ahead of their public appearance using a combination of very common and old marketing strategies with clever launch pages.

Staying on top of the most recent developments in your craft takes time, especially when you have to scan websites daily for articles and news worthy of your attention. Quality newsletters do the job for you. Just check your email inbox every couple of days to find a condensed and readily accessible selection of tidbits from a given website. We have selected here newsletters that deserve your attention.

A quality newsletter is not overloaded with articles, but rather features valuable insight and information, in addition to what the given website has featured during the week. Readability, relevance and lightness are the most important qualities of a newsletter. The following examples not only make for an enjoyable read, but feature developments, insights and scoops worth following.

Designing websites and related media for kids presents plenty of opportunities for Web designers. Openings are available at many businesses and schools, as well as through parents and kids themselves, giving designers many ways to find work on electronic and print projects that appeal to kids. The types of work range from interface designs for video games to websites for birthday parties.

There was a time when kids’ websites were brash and busy, packed with colors and cartoon typography. Fortunately, the scale of the children’s market across most product ranges has resulted in rapid innovation in recent years. Most websites aimed at children (or children and adults) now follow principles that take some account of kids’ perspectives on Web design.

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As designing static pages has become untenable, many have started to approach design in a modular way.
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